Setup Pelican on a new Laptop

Introduction¶

I wrote this blogpost while setting up Pelican on my new Libreboot T400 laptop running Debian Stretch. The migration and package installation was way easier than I thought. Due to the upgrade to a newer version of pelican a few changes were introduced resulting in changes in my configuration.

Migration¶

I am using the amd64 port of Debian Stretch. I had to install the following packages (notation in “pseudo-code” — I use aptitude):

install pelican
install pelican-docs
install python-typogrify # (a plugin that the elegant theme needs?!)
install python-bs4

I have not mentioned git because I install it on every of my machines.

• Copy blog and theme directories to new machine.

Default RSS behaviour changed¶

With the upgrade to Debian Stretch and therefore Pelican 3.7 the default RSS behaviour has changed as you can read here.

I am using now the

RSS_FEED_SUMMARY_ONLY = False

option for my RSS feed and added a “Summary:” tag for the Atom feed. This resulted in a rewrite of the whole feeds — I am subscribed to my own feeds with a feed reader and all posts where marked as unread — quite unpleasant when you have already read some of the posts… I think such quirks are some of the downsides of a static blog but I don’t have the insights and the comparison with other systems to make a proper assessment.

deprecated MD_EXTENSIONS¶

When running pelican content/ I got a warning that I should migrate from MD_EXTENSIONS. See this pelican developer blogpost which links to this part of the documentation.

In my case with the pelican elegant theme it resulted in a config change from:

MD_EXTENSIONS = ['codehilite(css_class=highlight)', 'extra', 'headerid',
                'toc(permalink=true)']

to

MARKDOWN = {
            'extension_configs': {
                        'markdown.extensions.codehilite': {'css_class': 'highlight'},
                        'markdown.extensions.extra': {},
                        'markdown.extensions.headerid': {},
                        'markdown.extensions.toc': {'permalink': 'true'},
                },
                'output_format': 'html5',
}

I hope this change does not result in any unexpected and unwanted behaviour. I am always a bit nervous when I have to change my configuration files or make a change to the elegant theme.

If you have any questions, suggestions, thoughts and comments please feel free to email me.

License of this blog post: Except where otherwise noted, content of this blog post is licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.